Today, the market is growing rapidly for products and services that can be delivered electronically from content providers to terminal users. In this description, the term “content provider” represents a “third party” offering content delivered over communication networks as data in electronic digital form, such as information, images, audio and video content, etc., in any field of interest.
A content provider typically offers delivery of different products and services, in particular to mobile users according to certain parameters relating to the general Quality of Service (QoS), which is highly dependent on the available bandwidth, bitrate (or “throughput”), transfer delay and geographical coverage of the mobile network used. For example, a streaming service requires a certain guaranteed delivered bitrate to enable continuous decoding and presentation of the content at the receiving end-user without unacceptable delays or disturbances.
US 2004/0174823 A1 discloses a solution for using support level agreements (referred to as “SLAs”) between “carriers” and “customers” i.e. end-users, defining terms of the carrier's responsibility to the customer with respect to availability, delay, throughput, customer service and cost.
In order to ensure that the offered QoS will be fulfilled at delivery of content to terminal users, a content provider may further establish a business agreement with the operator of a communication network, in the following description referred to as a “Service Level Agreement” SLA between the content provider and the network operator. An SLA generally dictates that the network operator should provide the network resources necessary for delivering content to end-users with the required and expected QoS. An SLA is typically tied to one or more specific services, such that a content provider may have plural SLAs with a network operator for different services.
Further, the network operator may also charge the end-users for any purchased content on behalf of the content providers, e.g. by means of regular subscription billing or pre-paid arrangements. The purchases of content can then be settled with the content providers according to suitable procedures, however lying outside the present invention. By closing such agreements with, e.g., major mobile network operators, the content providers are able to reach a greater customer segment than otherwise.
FIG. 1 is a simplified illustration of an arrangement where content providers 100 offer products and services for delivery of content to an end-user's mobile terminal A, requiring network resources from a mobile network operator 102. A first stage 1:1, generally illustrates that one or more service level agreements (SLA) are established between a content provider 100a and the operator 102, involving the storage of negotiated SLA parameters in a content provider (CP) database 104. Each SLA thus effectively guarantees a general Quality of Service (QoS) by ensuring the bandwidth, bitrate and geographical coverage needed for content delivery, as defined in the SLA.
The following stages in FIG. 1 illustrates a feasible procedure for enabling delivery of content from a content provider 100a to terminal A, using various well-known network nodes 104-110 of network operator 102. It is assumed that terminal A has already been authorised and obtained an IP connection from a gateway 106 in the operator's network, typically the GGSN (Gateway GPRS Switching Node).
An application function 108 in the operator's network is used for handling any requests from mobile users directed to third party content providers. Thus in a stage 1:2, application function 108 of operator 102 receives a content request from terminal A directed to an URL (Unified Resource Locator) associated with a specific service in content provider 100a. After the application function 108 has performed a mapping operation between the requested URL and identities of the content provider 100a and the invoked service, the request is further routed to a policy unit 110.
In a next stage 1:3, policy unit 110 performs a check in the CP database 104 whether any SLA is valid for the identified content provider/service combination. If so, a policy of that SLA is retrieved, basically dictating what network resources are to be allocated for delivery of the requested content to terminal A.
Policy unit 110 then accordingly installs the retrieved policy in the gateway 106 in a next stage 1:4, wherein the needed network resources are allocated in gateway 106, and the application function 108 is also notified. The procedure for installing the SLA policy and allocating network resources is not necessary to describe here in any detail to understand the concept of the present invention.
Thereafter, the application function 108 routes the service request received from terminal A to the content provider 100a, in a stage 1:5. In response thereto, the requested content is delivered from content provider 100a over the gateway 106 using the allocated network resources, in a last illustrated stage 1:6.
At present, establishing a service level agreement typically requires a negotiation between the content provider and the mobile network operator in order to settle different SLA parameters for the agreement in terms of, e.g., bitrate, bandwidth, transfer delay and geographical coverage. It is therefore often necessary that the two parties meet physically, or at least correspond extensively otherwise, in order to come to terms on the SLA. As mentioned above, a content provider offering plural services typically wants to establish an SLA with the network operator for each specific service since different services may need different network resources depending on the QoS requirements.
Hence, the activities involved in SLA establishment naturally becomes quite time-consuming, thus incurring great costs for both parties. Many minor content providers and others may therefore refrain from establishing SLAs, ultimately resulting in missed business opportunities for both parties. It is therefore desirable to generally reduce the efforts and time required for establishing an SLA between a content provider and a network operator.
The problems referred to above are not exclusively limited to mobile services and mobile networks but may also pertain to services in wire-based networks as well. However, SLAs are above all needed in mobile networks due to the limited bandwidth available for communication over the air.